


Virago

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Arthurian, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Curses, F/F, Folklore, Inexplicit mention of sexual assault, Knights - Freeform, Legends, Loss of Parent(s), Sexual Content, Vaginal Fingering, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-04 22:19:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18821887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Forced into an early rule and facing a curse that moves to swallow her kingdom, Ban-righ Marlene has little else to do but search out its source at the root. When a knight comes from beyond the sea to the south to try and help quell the threat, Marlene can hardly know what else the visitor brings.





	Virago

**Author's Note:**

> Wow I got really mad at the hard left turn GoT took and wrote this in a heated rage the day after watching ep. 8.05!!!!!!!!!!!! Women ruling competently is the shit, especially when they're hot for each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this corrective therapy of sorts, thanks for stopping by <3

If she focuses on the sound of the sconces hissing in the throne room, Marlene finds she doesn’t feel sorrow so acutely behind her heart for just moments at a time. But it’s enough.

The throne is a stiff seat, one she’s only played at taking since she was a girl and her nurse would let her up in her mother’s chair for just a bit before bed. When she was small, when her feet didn’t even meet the ground, it was exhilarating to look out over the long hall and pretend it was filled with her subjects—she had always been told she would have subjects, the citizens of this kingdom destined to be her largest inheritance someday, and that she should always rule with love and fairness as her mother had raised her.  _ Mother. _

Now it only hurts to wear the crown. The court wizards say this sadness will pass in time, but Marlene has a very hard time believing that the peach pit of sorrow will ever dislodge itself from her breast.

The queen had passed three nights ago in a fit of fever and weakness so sharp that Marlene could scarce believe the woman under the bedclothes was the same woman who had negotiated fairer trade measures over a thickened war table with the western lords; the same woman who had taught Marlene how to dance in the wildflower fields beyond the walls, taught her how to walk proudly and unabashedly take up her space in court.  _ You are the next queen, _ she had always told Marlene,  _ and so you are never to be made smaller by anybody. _

But in this moment, even after a very intimate and extremely emotional coronation, sitting the throne makes Marlene feel very small indeed.

“Your Highness, a petition from the south.”

Marlene looks up from blithely eyeing the black lace skimming the back of her hand, muted cloth like a shroud, to see her head emissary Lupin, in a kneel at the foot of the throne dias. “We will hear it.”  _ Lady living, _ even her voice sounds smaller right now. Lupin stands with his fist held across one shoulder, his head still inclined out of respect for the crown’s mourning period.

“Across the sea, the ruling counsel of the Sun has sent a knight in an attempt to cull the blight. If this champion should succeed, they request open trade lines once again.”

Marlene idly runs one fingertip over the edge of the same sleeve she had been watching, her heart tugging with Lupin’s words for the reminder of yet more sorrow with which she had been passed her crown.  _ A farce. Queen Blair, the regent of strength, bears Queen Marlene, the regent of pity.  _ She shifts in her seat and summons more strength in her lungs, looking down at Lupin as though he holds said knight in his pocket. “And is their knight yet on our shores?”

“Aye, your highness. Waiting just outside the throne room, if you would allow audience.”

“We will.”

Lupin strides aside to stand off the long, gold carpet for the audience of the throne, off beside one of the tall pillars beside the rest in his rank left in a very small counsel. Marlene’s mind wanders briefly as the doors groan open, counting her court as though tracking chickens in a coop after a fox has swept through—more and more leave each month as the blight encroaches, swallowing their crops and drying up their rivers with each passing season. Marlene hasn’t heard word of a hearty market morning since she was a girl.

Her kingdom is dying. Marlene has had just about enough of death.

The solid steps of half-plate armor, barely muted by the well-trod richness of the carpet atop the flagstones, tug Marlene out of her stewing. She looks up at the knight, outfitted in the bronze custom of the southern kingdoms, his carriage tall and broad of shoulder beneath the trappings of their service. The pauldron of a massive sword hangs at his waist, jeweled with a ruby as big as a fist, and a peaked helmet ringed by a rich, red scarf, worked over with filigree so fine Marlene can see shards of firelight and sunlight from the great glass window behind the throne throwing itself from the helm in bright spangles, sits proudly atop his head and covers his face like a monolith of war. Marlene wills her guts to quit twisting with distaste at the costumed fighter, so familiar from her mother’s time on the throne that Marlene remembers assigning private little nicknames to all of them in the secret reaches of her mind;  _ Ser Crag-Nose, Ser Keg Belly, The Honorable Lord Leech. _ They had all attempted to rush to the aid of a soon-to-be ailing kingdom, wizards wringing their hands with the incoming doom they could see in the stars, and every single one had dived into the thick of the wood and never returned again.

“We are grateful for your aid to our cause,” Marlene announces once the knight drops into a kneeled bow before her, thumbing the well-worn knob of the throne’s left arm beneath her restless fingers. “Of what name might we know you in order for our wizards to cast spells of fortitude and good fortune?”

The knight removes his helmet, and Marlene’s breath catches in her throat. Beneath the finery and finely-worked smithing, it isn’t a man at all.

“Ser Dorcas, of the Arid Meadows beyond the southern sea.” The knight speaks with a clear voice, throaty, low in her chest with all the trappings of strength as he looks up at Marlene with an unflagging, onyx-dark stare. Her skin is a rich and unblemished brown, her hair braided back into a thick, black plait, her face narrow but with a sharp jaw and a strong mouth. A scar traces the plane of one of her cheeks, a rake of three sharp lines, claws, emblematic as a wad of ribbons wrapped round a ceremonial sword to announce the height of her rank in war. “I will fix this curse for you and your people, and you will know peace delivered by my hand.”

Marlene feels a flush rise in her throat, hidden by the high rake of her collar, and she motions for Ser Dorcas to rise with a hand that only barely trembles. “We hear and accept your offer,” she recites, the words she heard a dozen times from her mother to all the failed knights past. “We will shelter and feed you for as long as your sojourn might last, and if you find your end in this place you will be given a hero’s burial. But if you succeed, you will know glory in our halls and your own back home.” Marlene pauses, the end of her recitation reached, foundering slightly in her own thoughts. The knight watches her, unwavering from her place on her knee, and Marlene swallows. “Do you know the stakes you face here, Ser Dorcas?”

“Indeed, your highness. We do not have such woods beyond the sea in the sand flats of my home, but I know danger like an old friend.”

Marlene clenches her teeth subtly. “There is not a single champion before you able to quell the blight. Are you prepared to fail?”

A few nervous throat-clearings and shuffles chain through the hall, and Marlene’s eyes flicker along the members of her court like a warning frost. She’s been advised before to curtail her pessimism, trust the wizards far more than she does, trust in the stars.  _ If the fucking stars haven’t helped us yet, they won’t start now. _ She looks back to the knight as Ser Dorcas stands, drawing back up to her full stature, and Marlene surmises at the back of her mind that she herself might only stand to Ser Dorcas’ shoulder height. A wry smile is playing at the corners of the knight’s mouth, and Marlene finds herself vaguely challenged by the arrogance inherent in that. It isn’t an unpleasant feeling. “I do not fail, your highness.”

“We hope for the sake of our kingdom that you are correct, Ser Dorcas. We will discuss your plans tomorrow.”

Marlene shifts in her seat once more as Ser Dorcas bows low and takes her leave of the court, plait now freed of her helm and swinging slightly along her shoulders and she exits the throne room.

There have been very few things in Marlene’s life that she remembers pushing at her foundations, and although she’s heard tales of lady knights she hasn’t seen one until now. Her proclivities, while known to her close court and tolerated so long as she would still produce heirs someday, have never thrown themselves into her imaginations of how she might rule.

But, as Marlene has always loathed, the stars choose to meddle wheresoever they please in all the wrong places.

—

The blight began in the woods. 

It is said that Righ Kerr cursed his lands by passions mislain, violently and without care for the woman he defiled—the king had been raised by poisonous men, brought up to believe his word was holy rite, and any who came against him were naught but foam on sand. This woman in the forest, found on a hunt in a hutch by the lakeside, appeared placid. Easy to handle. Easier to break. 

Righ Kerr had made his last bad decision in a life so far filled with them. 

She was a daughter of Beira and thus filled with strands of her foremother’s power, with which she retaliated as the king stole his pleasure.  _ Your rivers will turn,  _ she cursed him as he left her, tattered, on the floor of her own home;  _ In my mother’s winter, your children’s children will arrive home to find their lands fallow and their waters mud. Your kingdom will crumble under its own starvation, and your lineage will rot into the very ground that will devour your bones into ash. None will remember your name.  _

Infamously short of foresight or any fear for the magicks which control the turn of the universe, legend holds that Righ Kerr had simply spat on the floor and re-fastened his scabbard about his hips.  _ My children’s children will have more wit than to believe some empty-threated hag from the wood.  _

And so he sealed the fate of the kingdom. 

The myth warped over time, spun by a lie at first when the court wizards bustled in to report the incoming half-century’s prediction of woe and ruin. Righ Kerr, squirming, insisted upon black magick;  _ A creature in the wood, fearsome and starving! I cut off its tail when it tried to devour me, and it cursed our harvests. I aimed to slay it to break its ruddy curse, but it slunk away into some cave before I could. _

The court wizards, all too wise to refute what was clearly a lie, only sketched their bows and began making preparations to call in the knights to track down this “creature.” But as they found within a fortnight, a woman debased has the latent wrath of nature itself unleashed; the southern wood was transformed, seemingly overnight, into a thicket of thorns and daggering branches that made it impossible to saunter in as Righ Kerr had just months ago. None could traverse the wood safely, and those who tried were never seen again.  _ Transformed by the creature, _ began some of the rumors,  _ it’s amassing an army of horrible things. It will crash down on the castle within the century, surely. _

And so fear sewed the seeds of resistance and stoneheartedness in the face of wild growth. The queen bore a daughter into the world, followed by four more. Never was another son born to the regency. Righ Kerr passed in madness, his pyre attended only by his court, and as such the world continued to turn into the present with the blight at the doorstep of the kingdom and little to do but wait and see.

—

Over three weeks, Ser Dorcas settles into her role as the latest champion pledged to cull the blight. Marlene’s court takes to her quickly, a handsome woman with a loud laugh after she’s had a couple goblets of wine, and despite Marlene’s resistance to dreaming in the grand miasma of mourning, she finds herself warming to the comfort of, if not wholly  _ hope _ , anticipation.

Through the duties of court and rule and the ministrations of the month-long prayer series to see her mother’s spirit safely to the Lady—far across the sea, over to the misty island where the clerics once wrote the Lady acts as ageless steward of the afterlife—Marlene gets to know little corners and edges of Ser Dorcas. She can drink even Marlene’s strongest officers under the table, she exercises herself in the sparring ring to lengths that would exhaust a team of horses, and her wit is shockingly sharp when she manages to wrap the language of the kingdom around her mother tongue in just the right way. Marlene finds that she enjoys hearing the knight speak, at length, about previous campaigns and festivals in which she’s fought or sparred, her accent tripping over those teeth of hers so bright-white against her face. 

“That scar of yours,” Marlene hears one of the guardsmen ask at the Candlemas feast—Black, her captain of the Keepsguard, prettier than he has any right being with such a staggering potential for vicious combat roiling under his surface; “Did you get attacked by one of those shrieking harpies all the songs from the deserts tell us about?”

Dorcas smiles to herself and leans across the table, and Marlene strains her ears over the ambience of the hall to hear what Dorcas retorts from the table’s-length away. “Aye, a harpy.” Dorcas cuts her eyes at the other guardsmen, all listening with varying degrees of obvious rapture, and smiles a sharp, secret smile. Marlene’s throat tightens. “She lured me to her nest, and I fucked her so well she fell asleep.”

A few of the guardsmen break with laughter, Black the loudest of them all, grinning with fraternal acceptance of this foreigner as he leans closer to her now completely twined up in her story. “And? What, was it part of her foreplay to try gauging your eye out?”

“Oh, no; I tried to take one of her golden eggs back to the city, but she woke up when I was trying to leave without waking her. I got away with my eye and my life, but unfortunately she snatched the egg back.”

“Should have killed her,” one of the other guards pipes up around a wide bite of mutton, Potter, with his hair all askew from the long day of training behind him. Marlene barely marks him, for her eyes are stuck fast to Ser Dorcas grinning at the retinue before her like a lioness over a clutter of cubs. 

“I don’t know about you northern barbarians, but my code of honor prevents me from killing a solid fuck.”

The guardsmen roar with laughter again, and Captain Black reaches across to clap her on the shoulder.  _ This one, I like this one, _ that gesture calls to the rest of his kinsmen. Marlene’s belly feels warm, as though she’s privy to the camaraderie even from her head table alone in another set of mourning garb; she is hardly prepared for Ser Dorcas’ eyes to flicker over to her, light and sparked with a smile just behind the look that perhaps asks,  _ Did you like that little lark I fed them? _

Marlene doesn’t smile, but perhaps the way she quickly averts her eyes is what makes Ser Dorcas’ grin broaden ever so slightly.

Ser Dorcas heads off to the woods for the first time the very next morning. It’s early enough that the clouds still sit low and grey-heavy along the grasses, thick winter fog like a moody beast, and Marlene rides out alongside emissary Lupin and the lead triad of court wizards who have been briefing Ser Dorcas on the history of the southern wood since she arrived. They all stop a league away from the edge of the thicket, the invisible border where their horses begin to whicker nervously as they feel something dark and charged in the air that none of the humans can.

“We’ve constructed wards over the last several years,” Fenwick explains with a squinting look into the scab of the treeline, his blue robes hanging heavy on his shoulders beneath the iron chain of his magickal office. “They only go so far to ensure your eased passage, but if you need to move beyond them that is either your prerogative or we will need to discuss further steps to build more.” He says it with a tone that bristles for the foolhardiness of their prior champions, crashing into the mists and the thorns only to never emerge again. Marlene shifts in her saddle.

Lupin glances at Ser Dorcas to confirm her comprehension of the language, and Dorcas nods once before turning to the wizards. Bones and Lovegood flank Fenwick like a pair of arms, and though Marlene trusts them she can’t help but feel as though all their offices pale in comparison to the power slowly compressing them all from beyond the trees. “I won’t go deeper than the wards today, but I’ll go as far as I can. I’ll return before sundown.” Ser Dorcas looks at them all in turn before landing on Marlene, her eyes clear and honest.  _ She believes in herself, _ Marlene thinks, only able to nod before the knight turns her horse with a sure hand to gallop out to the wood;  _ What on the Lady’s rocky shores does that feel like? _

Left with nothing to do but wait, Marlene decides she can at least distract herself with the rota of prayer.

The linden lee at the edge of the keep has been a hollow home for Marlene through the mourning period, and on this the final day Marlene feels a keen sense of relief flush with guilt in her heart. After today, her mother will have been accepted into the beyond for all Marlene’s dutiful petitioning and oblating and kneeling beneath the tree’s broad branches, naked and rattling with the winter air that blows into the lee from its open stone walls built delicately around the tree. The sigil of the Lady decorates every flat surface raised up around her, and Marlene feels each one like an eye watching her doing her daughterly duty— _ Look at the queen, letting go of her mother’s hand to walk afloat in this crowd now. _

The whispering and bowing and running of her thumbs along the Lady’s medallion in her hands feels numb after long enough, and after what seems as though the entire afternoon has passed Marlene feels the thick press of tears at her shut eyelids. It’s too much, she senses now as a stone in her stomach. The responsibility of rule thrust upon her like a fist, the growing threat of the blight just outside her walls, the tension of keeping herself upright and strong in front of her countrymen—all of it chokes like stiff rags, and as she finishes the last gesture of obeisance for her mother’s spirit, Marlene breaks down.

She sinks to her knees with her hands clenched around her medallion, pressing it to her breast as though she might swallow it through the silks and lace and skin and bone beneath it, and begins to cry ugly, open-mouthed sobs. The silence of the lee sucks the sound  up and away from her, the Lady’s invisible presence pulling her grief from her in salty strands of tears and spittle and all the empty sorrow that bears them into the air. “Why?!” Marlene gasps to the stone and the leaves that whisper above her, bowing her head to the ground, “Why would you leave me like this?!”

It’s as much a plea to her mother’s spirit as it is the touch of the Lady, blessings long un-felt in Marlene’s spirit as she’s grown into adulthood and misses the glimmering innocence of the past. She remembers, in a barreling rush, crying on her first lunal as the instinct to believe she was dying was swiftly replaced by the much deeper, echoing feeling of losing of her childhood.  _ You’re grown now, _ her nurse had said with a smile, and yet Marlene had felt nonesuch peace or happiness. Every year since then had been rife with new hardships, new heartbreaks and fresh knowledge of the deeper workings of the crown that Marlene feels have slowly calcified her heart from the bottom up. “I’m trying my best,” she weeps into the marble floor, where a Lady’s sigili stares up at her, unblinking. “I don’t know what to do—!” 

_ None of us ever do, _ the lee seems to sigh around her. It is less than comforting, and so Marlene continues to cry into the earth. Her mother is dead. Her people are dying. The only thing she can rest her hope on now is a woman wandering through the wood, unsure of what she might find within and perhaps even without any way to fight if she discovers it at all. The entire situation is hellish, a cruel joke of fate, the bloody fucking  _ stars _ japing down at them all as though they have ever had a chance at all to escape the clutch of predestination—

“Your highness?”

Marlene’s breath seizes around the bubbling shape of another sob and sits up, turning to face Dorcas’ voice as relief fills her in an unbidden rush. “Ser Dorcas” she blurts, wiping tidily at her eyes with a rough sniffle as though it’s entirely normal for a queen to cry in a heap in a linden lee. “You’ve returned?” Her throat feels tight, constricted, and she gulps air around her own self-pity and drums up as much self-respect as possible, standing slowly. “And what have you found, there in the wood?”

“It...there is much dark magick there, your highness. I did not get far in, but I assume it only thickens as one nears its center.” Dorcas’ eyes flit about the lee as she speaks, always returning to Marlene’s face but departing for quick moments as though thirsty to drink in all the strange parts of this foreign place while she can. She doesn’t look mussed by effort or fear, but her plait is slightly unbound and she has a small twig stuck in the hair at her nape. Marlene frowns, sniffing again sharply.

“What can be done to counteract it?”

“I’m due to speak with the wizards tomorrow.”

“A fine choice, they are indeed the masters of their craft.” If bitterness seeps into Marlene’s words, it is entirely accidental. Ser Dorcas steps closer, gazing up at the linden branches raking out above them, with her hands behind her back. Marlene takes a quick stock of her armor, unmarked, her right pauldron level with Marlene’s eyes, before turning her own attention back to the tree. The medallion in her fingers feels very heavy, very cold, and very empty of purpose in this moment.

“Is it custom,” Ser Dorcas murmurs after a quiet moment, “to cry when one prays to your gods?”

“We have but one god, our Lady. She does not demand tears from her devotees, but yes, sometimes they fall as we ask for her intercession.” Marlene watches Dorcas out of her periphery, both of them clearly pretending to focus on the tree as they share this space.

“I will cure the blight, your highness, you need not cry for the fate of your people.”

Marlene can’t hold in the humorless cough of laughter she replies to that, such optimism,  _ Do they breed the very rays of the sun into their children in the south? _ Vague jealousy at the freedom to feel lightness prickles at her bones. “You speak as though you can see the future, Ser Dorcas.”

Dorcas shrugs, an easy motion that sees her armor scrape together in a soft, leathern whisper. “I simply know this type of magick. It will take some unraveling, but I believe I can solve this.”

“Ah, yes. I had already forgotten the part where you will put all your trust in the wizards.”

Marlene turns to face Dorcas just as well when the knight moves to look at her. Fierce conviction burns under Marlene’s cheeks, a very sudden spark of defiance of whose origin she is unsure but whose intensity she cannot ignore. “I place my trust in very few people besides myself, your highness,” Ser Dorcas murmurs, a vaguely dangerous sound from so close, a sound like a giant wildcat purring warning at a hunter. “My confidence comes from intimate knowledge in the witchcraft of my homeland, the work of my mother and all the women who came before her. I assure you I am not posturing as your prior champions may have done. I am twice the knight they all wish they could have been.”

Marlene blinks rapidly, just as much for the salty rime of leftover tears on her lashes as for the attempt to gather herself. Part of her wants to deny the surety standing before her in banded leather and engraved bronze, tall and intimidating and everything Marlene is not, cannot be, on her throne—but her stubbornness dissolves under the stress of worry. Marlene clutches the Lady’s medallion tighter and wills away another threatening bout of tears. “And you’re certain the wizards will understand and help you with your strategies?”

“I’m certain they will do whatever it takes to keep the blight away from the kingdom, whether or not they trust completely in my methods.”

Marlene can hardly argue with sense. “You speak like a woman with a throne behind her,” she says with a weak smile, hoping the remark lands as the compliment she means for it to be instead of the jab for which it might be taken. Thankfully—and with a small tugging pleasantness in Marlene’s guts—Dorcas smiles at her.

“Ah, but I do. You must know your hope in me is the truest motivation, your highness.”

Marlene’s breath catches. Something flashes behind the pretty dark of Dorcas’ eyes, quick and alluring, and Marlene feels something in the air shift as she tracks it. The linden branches above them creak gently as though the Lady is shutting her door to give them privacy beneath her branches, and Dorcas takes a single step closer. Her armor shifts with a comfortable clinkering of plate and chain and straps, suddenly looking very tired from so near. Marlene is struck, like an arrow through her spine, by the compulsion to make this champion feel as though she has a warm hearth at which to unspool at the end of each of these likely-lengthening days, after diving in and out of those cursed trees and chasing whatever blackened magick lives in their branches for nothing but the peace of Marlene’s own people.

“I would you feel at home with that hope,” Marlene murmurs. Aimless, letting naught but instinct guide her hand, Marlene reaches up to trace a finger along the patterns of solar rays and dancing warriors engraved along Ser Dorcas’ gorget. Her hand looks so pale there against the bronze, delicate as a violet stem caressing an iron wall in a breeze, and Marlene just barely starts when Ser Dorcas reaches her own hand up to take Marlene’s between those strong fingers of hers.  _ She’s warm, _ Marlene thinks, entwining their fingers as though it was the most natural motion in all of time.

“Is this alright, your highness?” Ser Dorcas’ voice is petal-soft and closer than Marlene had thought it when they had initially turned to face one another, but that’s a good thing. That’s a  _ lovely  _ thing. Marlene nods and, slipping the Lady’s medallion back into her bodice, wraps her other hand around Ser Dorcas’ own to clasp it ardently. She looks up, face open and laid bare to invite the ambition that rolls off of the knight as morning mists on the fens. Ser Dorcas’ lips are but a breath away from Marlene’s own, her bright gaze drinking Marlene down like a tonic. She is stunningly beautiful from so near to all the deeper echoes of Marlene’s compulsions.

“This is alright,” a whisper so sure it nearly makes Marlene’s voice break again but with an entirely different emotion than her earlier grief. If she could have leapt from the skiff of mourning onto the shores of moving past loss while only sullying her shoes and the hem of her skirts, Marlene would have called that a victory. But if her champion from across the southern sea can carry her over the gap without a single drop of water touching her at all, it will be summative triumph.

When she leans up and kisses Ser Dorcas, the press of their lips is warmer than anything Marlene has felt in a long, long time.

—

The following several days are a whirlwind of conferring with emissaries, wizards, and commoners as Dorcas brings back her knowledge from within the tangle of the woods. The emissaries need to know which sovereignties to continue courting for more champions for help breaking the curse, if any more at all as they see Ser Dorcas continuing to return at the end of each day. The wizards are hard at work reweaving wards and spelling up new incantations for Ser Dorcas’s fortitude in the face of the curse, scanning her each evening with their wands of twisted metal as though she comes back with residue of the magick spattered across her armor. 

The commoners are Marlene’s duty alone, nobody but herself in attendance to guide her in hearing their petitions. More food for the riverfolk, fish wash to the shore belly-up and spotted with decay each morning; more protection for the plainsmen to the east, warriors from the neighboring free marches are coming in the night to steal into their stores; more judiciousness further to the north, as horses turning up dead are either being gutter by winter herself or someone is getting away with slaughter. Each evening Marlene retires from the throne room, her head feels twelve stone heavier and she needs for wine.

She thinks often on summoning Ser Dorcas to her chambers, especially after the short trysts of exploratory kisses and lingering touches they’ve managed in quieter corners of the keep since breaching those walls with one another. Twice Marlene has found Ser Dorcas in a side stairwell on her way back from briefing the wizards, three times waiting for Marlene to finish a brief prayer for protection outside of the linden lee just after dawn, twice more as Marlene has been simply clearing her head in the winter gardens and wishing for an early spring. But wrapping herself too thickly in another’s heart or body has never spelled wild success for Marlene, not especially a woman tasked with trying to save the kingdom from blighted ruin.

Still—the queen is allowed to dream.

It happens just past midnight a month-and-a-half after Ser Dorcas’ arrival to the keep, at the end of a day too long and too full of frustrating misfortune for Marlene to handle on her own. She paces her chambers alone, her wine forgotten on the tray with which her handmaid Lily had brought it in several hours ago, her fire stoked and bodice loosened to peel away her outer layer of dress and leave her in the simple silks of her shift. Barefooted, auburn hair unbound and more than a bit wild with the way she unconsciously worries her fingers through it, Marlene is staring into the fire and trying to divine a way to shunt more resources into the riverlands without accidentally starving the keep in the process—a soft knock at her door drops a stitch from her mind’s threading. She curses softly to herself, still staring at the hearth. “Come in.”

“I’ve news, my l—your highness, I…”

Marlene turns quickly to face Ser Dorcas, the knight’s breath coming quickly as she stands in the doorway. Her own hair is mostly unbound, exertion high and red in her cheeks, her eyes widened slightly as they drop to catalogue the barest she’s seen Marlene’s body yet. She blinks several times, her fingers tightening where they hold the doorjamb, her other hand still holding fast to the scrolling gilt of the latch handle. Marlene gathers the edges of her undone surcoat more tightly around her shoulders, modesty automatic, and does her own quick triageny of what she can see of Dorcas. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, I’m fine, I—”

“Come inside, sit, you look as though you’ve seen the dead.”

Dorcas’ expression hardens but she enters nonetheless, unbuckling her armor as she goes. Marlene pushes her door shut again, lingering by the entryway and watching Dorcas wrestle with worry-clumsy fingers at all the hasps of her garb for several moments before crossing the room again to help her. Bent close, working at the straps of foreign-built armor, Marlene is glad for something to busy her hands and her attention that isn’t the plain fact of Ser Dorcas entering her chambers well past dark and very much in private.

“There’s a woman in the wood.”

Marlene’s thumb slips from a strap and one of Dorcas’ pauldrons crashes to the floor. They both scramble to pick it up, their hands tangling around the metal, and Marlene looks up to meet Dorcas’ stare like flint knocking stone with a flurry of sparks. “How do you mean,” a hiss that matches the crackling intensity of the fire burning low on its wood behind them.

Dorcas straightens back into a stand, helping Marlene to stand again with a gentle hand ushering her up as though it’s the most natural gesture in her body, and sets back to her own armor. “I reached the edge of Fenwick’s wards today, he was unable to spin them any further out and couldn’t figure why. But there was a hut, someone’s home made from walls of old branches.” She shrugs off her breastplate and seems to shrink marginally; not height-wise, for her strong bulk still radiates power as Ser Dorcas rolls her shoulders out slowly, eyes shut briefly around visible fatigue, but the exhaustion seems to weigh more heavily on her without the steel there to support it. Marlene takes the shell of the armor from her, almost staggering under its heft, and leans it against the foot of the wine tray. Dorcas lets out a low breath. “There was smoke coming from its chimney.”

A living person in the blighted wood; Marlene’s head spins more than a bit. She sits heavily in the chair closest to her, very near to the fire, and frowns up at Ser Dorcas, now working at her vambraces. “And you went inside?”

“Aye.”

“What does she call herself?”

“Morag.”

“How long has she been there?”

Dorcas sits in the chair opposite Marlene’s to set to her greaves, toeing off her boots in the same motion. “I asked not after her age specifically, but she looked no older than you. The whole place smelled of magick though, more than the forest itself and much older than anything I’ve ever known, so very likely at least a century.”

Marlene tightens her jaw. “What did she have to say? Is she the one behind the blight?” Her heart picks up as she forms the words, speaks it to being, lets her thoughts catch up with her tongue and knows it before she even waits for Dorcas’ response; they’ve found it. Ser Dorcas of the Arid Meadows beyond the southern sea has discovered what no man before her could.

Dorcas leans back in her chair, armor removed, and deposits the last of her outerwear, a well-worn jerkin, on the floor beside her. Left in breeches and a doublet, she looks down to the very depths of Marlene’s eyes and nods. “Aye.”

“Lady deliver us,” Marlene breathes, her hand immediately clutching at the base of her throat as though she might hold onto her quickening pulse and keep it from cantering away. “How we stop it?”

Dorcas casts her eyes into the fire, the muscle in her jaw tightening. “It is...a very deeply-sewn curse.”

“Of course its deeply-sewn, the wizards haven’t been able to lift it for years,” Marlene snaps, “how do we  _ stop it?” _

Dorcas slices her eyes back at Marlene, quick and exacting, a hawk’s stare, and Marlene’s heart wavers.  _ As long as you are in my halls, I am your queen, _ it cries against her ribs in a sharp tattoo. Neither of them speak for a moment, the fire cracking faintly and the wind outside buffeting at the stone seams in the dense silence.

“She wants to meet you,” Dorcas finally murmurs.

“Meet me?”

“Tomorrow morning, at sunrise.”

“I’m the only living regent, I can’t very well go blindly into the wood and—”

“It was your great-grandfather,” Dorcas interrupts her with a lowered voice. Something about the weight of her stare stops Marlene’s rambling fear cold in its tracks, and she watches Dorcas, still, until the knight sighs and looks back at the hearth.

“My great-grandfather, did what?”

Dorcas worries her bottom lip between her teeth, nervously rubs her right thumb and forefinger together, and swallows thickly. “He defiled her, Morag, left her bleeding on the ground.”

Marlene’s throat tightens with a wrenching pull. “He—?” Dorcas nods, as though the vague horror on Marlene’s face is enough to paint the picture anonymously in the air.

“She cursed him afterwards,” Dorcas continues; “He would bear no more sons, his name would die with him, and his kingdom would slowly rot from the inside out. We’ve reached the very end of that string now, and all that’s left to do is...my vocabulary is failing me in your tongue, we’re in the final years.” Dorcas’ hand winnows the air, presses her fingers to her forehead, looking very distressed.

“How many years?” Marlene’s voice feels hollow, and Dorcas’ responding look is dark.

“Not enough.”

Marlene clenches her fists together in her lap and lets out a slow, tremulous breath. “What do I do?”

Dorcas runs her tongue along the seam of her lips, pensive, and even through the fug of alarm and confusion and sleepiness Marlene’s inner hunger tracks its movement with surprising voracity. “She wants to speak with you, she would tell me nothing beyond what I’ve just told you and she knew I’ve been near ‘the daughter of Mac Fhionghuin.’ That’s your surname, is it not?”

“Aye.” Marlene feels hoarse, the winds taken from her sails, and she blindly reaches out to pour a goblet of wine. She founders about for another cup for Dorcas, but before she can stand to fetch one from the cupboard Dorcas has leaned forward and taken the carafe. She sits back in her seat and holds it up toward Marlene in a mocking toast, her expression twisted wryly, before putting it to her lips and drinking a deep pull of it. Marlene can only respond with her own small sip from the crystal in her hands, watching Dorcas continue to stare at the hearth as though it has secrets to tell.  _ You are very alike in strange ways, _ a distant feeling scratches at her thoughts from deep down in her belly.

“So you’ll come with me tomorrow?” Dorcas glances over at Marlene expectantly, one eyebrow just barely raised. The firelight thrown onto her face is stark against the raking pull of the scars beneath her eye, and Marlene stares at their silvery threads for a moment before nodding.

“I will.” She swallows another deep draught of wine, dry and sharp and blood-dark as she watches it sluice into her mouth with each sip, and sets the empty cup noisily back on the tray. Dorcas’ expression looks taken aback in an impressed sort of way when Marlene looks back at her. “What?” Marlene doesn’t quite manage the ask without a hint of nervous laughter at the tail of the word.

“Nothing, only that’s the most I think I’ve seen you drink that my entire time here combined.” Dorcas smiles at her then, a subtle thing, and it lights Marlene’s passion like very sudden tallow flaring to life low in her belly.

“I was in mourning,” Marlene insists weakly, worrying the hem of her surcoat between her fingers as she slips it off—it’s gotten rather warm over the past several minutes. “Don’t tell me you were expecting me to drown my sorrows and stresses in wine like a common soldier?”

Dorcas truly laughs at that then, a free sound, virago-strong and pleasant enough that it infects Marlene’s own disposition and pushes a smile onto her face as well. “Well met, your highness.”

_ “Excuse _ you,” Marlene insists, her humor souring the put-on haught she tries to wear, fails, splits into giggles alongside Dorcas’ laughter. When the mild hilarity subsides, Marlene gazes into the middle distance of her floor a moment. “Ser Dorcas, you’ve done it.”

“Done what?” The knight takes another long sip of wine and sets the carafe on the floor beside her chair. “Made you laugh? Because believe you me, I know it; it’s like the sun’s out for the first time I’ve been north of the sea.”

Oh, she knows exactly what she’s doing. Ser Dorcas pins Marlene with a very heated look, the sort that Marlene has received on her rare adventures in commoners’ garb into the taverns past the keep filled with solid, tall women who could make her forget, for one night in the ink-black secrecy of a false name and hair temporarily charmed blonde by a very reluctant Gideon, that Marlene had any commitment to the calling of the crown. Marlene shifts in her chair and purposefully lets her hair fall in a soft wave against her shoulder. She smiles earnestly at Ser Dorcas and reaches across the space between them to take the knight’s hand. Again, as the first time they had touched, Ser Dorcas is deliciously, enviably warm. “You’ve found the root of the blight. Nobody died in the process, nothing was sacrificed, no blood shed. You are indeed twice the knight those who came before you ever were.”

Dorcas lets out a low breath and shifts in her seat, raking her eyes along Marlene with blatant approval. Marlene feels heat rise under her skin, all over her body, lit from within by violent tug in her core, and watches Ser Dorcas closely. 

“Come here, your highness, if you please.”

Marlene is up such that one would think the chair beneath her dissolved to dust, slipping into Dorcas’ lap as though carved to fit there from warm, wet marble. Their mouths crash together in desperate want, Marlene’s hands up immediately to cradle Dorcas’ face, licking into her lips with vigor that sees her groaning faintly into the movement. Dorcas’ own touch slips behind Marlene, the thin silk of her shift folding and sliding along with it, one hand to Marlene’s lower back and the other to the curve of Marlene’s neck beneath her hair. She feels secure in Dorcas’ arms, she has since they began falling together however briefly in the spaces of the keep, and this time is no different; but this time Marlene is positively afire, burning at every branch of her veins, and she needs more.

“The bed,” Marlene gasps into the hot space of a pause for air as Dorcas nips at her bottom lip, “get us to the bed.”

Smiling into another deep twist of a kiss, Dorcas shifts slightly to grip both hands, so large and dextrous she can almost palm each round individually, on the swell of Marlene’s backside. She squeezes softly, pulling a ragged whimper from Marlene’s depths, and stands, wrapping Marlene’s knees about her waist, remaining there for a moment, kissing Marlene to pieces while holding her aloft as though she were light as a feather. The show of strength makes Marlene feel woozy, drunk with arousal, and she presses her ankles against the small of Dorcas’ back to spur her forward.

Needing no further encouragement, Dorcas moves them with slow, distracted steps over to the downy expanse of Marlene’s bed. The embroidered quilting and layers of furs pillow up around Marlene as Dorcas lowers her among them, as though dipping her into the perfumed oil of anointment for the Lady’s guidance rite on her fourteenth birthday. Marlene opens her eyes, hazy, every inch of her piqued and ready to be touched, straining at the sheer fall of her shift, and tugs at the hem of Dorcas’ doublet. “Off,” she whispers.

“You like to give commands, do you not?” Dorcas murmurs into the side of Marlene’s neck, licking and kissing her there as she works at the leather lacing on her shirt. “A born ruler.”

“You’ve a tongue made of vinegar,” Marlene chokes out around a blissful sound as Dorcas tucks one hand between them to knead softly at her breast, tenderly passing her fingertip over and around the hard bud of her nipple overtop of her shift. Dorcas reaches the last tie of her doublet and shrugs it off, the muscles of her shoulders bunching and sliding with all their latent power beneath Marlene’s hands where they’ve slipped to grip her there with insistent purchase, left in her tunic and breeches as she redoubles the fervor of her kisses to press Marlene down into the bedding.

“Careful, your highness,” Dorcas soon whispers against Marlene’s mouth; “for all its vinegar, this tongue can do very sweet things to you.”

They dissolve into roaming hands and panting gasps, pushing at clothing and pressing and pulling at one another’s warm flesh until Marlene is freed of her shift and naked, pulling Dorcas’ tunic over her head before setting immediately to the ties of her breeches. Dorcas’ breasts are small, free beneath her tunic without need for any fastenings to keep them in place beneath her armor, a stark contrast to Marlene’s own plushy curves that Dorcas is currently doing a fine job of worshipping with those sword-wrought hands of hers—Marlene fumbles twice with Dorcas’ breeches before Dorcas bats her hands aside and swiftly undoes them herself, stepping out of their sensible cling and crawling atop Marlene to knit their fingers together and slide Marlene’s arms up straight above her along the bed.

“Touch me,” Marlene begs, has never had to beg for anything in her life but feels absolutely starved of everything in the moment even with Dorcas astride her body. 

“Where?” Dorcas murmurs into her hair, peppering kisses just around her ear to tickle her lightly, contrast the searing touch of their skin everywhere else.

“Inside me, with your fingers, please, by the Lady—”

“You are indeed direct, is this how you handle your diplomacy? _ I like it.” _ Dorcas smirks so deeply into the tease that Marlene can feel it against her temple, those lips twisted sideways, and Marlene is ready to check what’s left of her pride at the door and beg once more when she feel the warm, sure press of two of Dorcas’ fingers prodding gently at her quim. Her wetness gives easily to the touch, slick and ready and opening eagerly, taking both Dorcas’ middle and fingers with an easy slide as she sets her thumb to peak of Marlene’s clitoris and begins a slow rub. Words fail the both of them for the rest of the night.

Marlene arches into the touch as Dorcas pins her with another bout of kisses, caressing the soft planes of Marlene’s body with her free hand to pull ever more tiny sounds from her. Marlene grounds herself with one hand wrapped in the solid base of Dorcas’ loosened plait, the other gripping the back of Dorcas’ thigh, spurring her on, her grip twitching as Dorcas finds all the right angles of touch over and over and over again.

Gratefully, Marlene melts into pleasure like a hot spring. Dorcas gives, receives, and gives again as though she had been born to do nothing but repeatedly show Marlene the edge of the universe, glittering and perfect and blinding-white in the glory of the backs of her eyelids.

The fire dies after long enough, Marlene’s body exhausts itself of countless climaxes, boneless and woozy and at supreme peace, folded against Dorcas’ side beneath the covers, and the women fall into ichor-thick sleep alongside one another, safe, dreaming deeply before the day breaks on the fulcrum of the unknown in the morning.

—

The forest looms like an open wound, thick with predawn mists, and Marlene fights drowsiness and apprehension handily within her heart.

The rhythm of her horse cantering after Ser Dorcas’ spry gelding is doing more to rock her back to sleep than to keep her awake for the incoming meeting with Morag, but she keeps her eyes open by the sheer force of will alone. It had only marginally helped that Dorcas woke her with another sweet round of eden, petting at the soft bed of curls between her legs while Marlene was still emerging from sleep, waking with a shuddering orgasm that had only led to more of the same for the both of them before having to roll out of the covers, dress once more, and face the sunless earliness outside to return to that place in the woods.

Marlene hasn’t worn trousers in quite some time, but she’s grateful for the warmth of the close-gathered fabric in the damp chill around her. The cloak slung across her shoulders peaks into a wide hood, brimming low to shadow her face—none in the keep are aware of her plan besides Lily, and even then Marlene had only left a hastily-scrawled note on the wine tray for the handmaid to find on her way in to freshen the quarters much later in the morning;  _ Ser Dorcas has found the root of the curse. If I have not returned by night, do not search for us. In such case, tell Lupin to appoint the next in line. —M _

Just ahead of her, Ser Dorcas has paused by the edge of the wood. Marlene approaches and rears her own horse to a soft stop, lulling him as she does. “This is the entrance you took yesterday?” Marlene peers into the dark gnarl of the trees as she asks, her heart twisting into her throat as she sees nothing but bottomless black beyond.

“It will seem a short journey in, but I have a feeling she can magick time to bend it around us,” Dorcas hisses. “I emerged well past dark yesterday, and I entered just after peak rise of the sun. Stay close, your highness. Please.”

“Aye.” Marlene nods at her before reaching across to sweep a soft thumb over the back of Dorcas’ hand, one of the only free patches of skin not covered by her armor. Dorcas catches her fingers and lifts Marlene’s hand to her lips, pressing a fierce kiss there as their gazes burn into one another through the half-light. “Lead on.”

—

The bards of the northern courts went on to compose ballads of the warrior from the south, the Gallowglass of the Sun, who dove into the blighted wood and burnt out the curse from its very core with the ferocity of the fire within her soul, a daughter of light itself, cleansing the land and the waters and the air in one fell stroke of her holy sword.

Legend holds that Ban-righ Marlene was a gentle leader, albeit with a sorrowful short reign after the passing of mother, the most noble Ban-righ Blair, was said to have broken Marlene’s spirit beyond repair. She disappeared the day the land’s curse was broken, and it has been told that the queen was tied to the blight through a tragic connection between her heart and the poisonous root of the curse’s origin—something about an ancestor defiling the land, commanding his serfs to over-till the earth until it was too scarred to bear fruit any longer.

The kingdom passed to the young Bana-mharcais Hestia, only just past her anointment for the Lady but, with a sigh of relief felt through a kingdom already stretched thin and in no position to weather a coup, well within the age of assuming the crown.

If, several years into her reign, Hestia rode down to the lakeside beyond the southern wood and heard a strain of laughter on the wind, laughter that was hearty and bold and just a touch past tame, she wrote it off as a trick of the wood—for everyone knew that wood was touched by magick, thick with it, still humming with the residue of the curse that consumed it for a century. Hestia returned to the keep brisk with early morning air, happy for the long ride on her new mare who was a perfect courting gift from the western lord who smiles at Hestia as though she hangs the moon.

Had Hestia stayed just a bit longer, she might have caught sight of a woman draped in raw-woven cloth weaving in and out of the trees, a woman with long, auburn hair and the stronghearted stare of a former queen, tracking deer with those sharp eyes of hers and the pull of a bow so perfectly-curved it could only have been strung by a witch’s hand.

But the legends are only legends. The bards sing what they will of the past, and time spins ever-forward, and the trappings of what once was dissolve into the mists that hang low in the sky as the sun rises evermore.


End file.
